100K to 1M — How we 10xed monthly search traffic in 15 months

When looking for legendary SEO success stories on the internet, it doesn’t get much better than this:

How could you top that?

Brad Smith and Codeless took monday.com from 100K to 1M in 12 months (and since then way further).

Ben Goodey has displayed some of the wildest SEO success stories on his podcast, like how Peanut App grew 0 to 2.3M in 12 months.

And there are probably countless others (share yours with us on Twitter!) we don’t know of.

Anyhow, here’s our addition to the thread on “what is your greatest SEO success story?” with the following stats:

The results have been great, and the past 2 years have provided us with valuable insights we would like to share with the community, especially other early-stage startups that want to remain cost-efficient with their acquisition.

In this post, we will share our content production tool stack and 7 learnings from our journey thus far.

Trend in past 30 day total website visitors in the past 15 months (95% being organic traffic).

Amount of clicks from Google in January 2023.

The point of this post is to help other startups learn from our work and hopefully find out better ways to do SEO.

Also, we are always looking to optimize our processes and improve. By sharing how we do things, others can hopefully help us. So send us all feedback, ideas, and tips you might have for us.

We also hope to find skilful people who could help us with the next step turning clicks to revenue, but more on that at the end of the post.

Read on!

Here are 7 key learnings from the past 2 years:

If you are not going to write in-house, do the work of finding good writers. This will help you:

Although we're an AI startup, we have never used AI to generate any type of content on our blog. If you want to find great writers who aren't going to sell you copy-pasted or AI-generated text, you should:

There is a good reason why around 80% of our posts have been written by Lawrie Jones from 42Group (he’s amazing).

The content brief is perhaps the most important part of your content marketing operations. There you will give your writer all the necessary industry/domain knowledge and provide a clear structure on how and what they should write.

We have iterated and optimized this process for our needs, to make working with us as easy as possible for our writers, by asking them questions like:

This has then allowed us to find win-win solutions, where we can establish long-term relationships with writers who want to work with us and can consistently provide us with high-quality output.

We can't tell you how to exactly succeed with SEO, but we are certain that doing the boring and basic work really well will make a huge difference. So double down on the basics and do the "grunt work" yourself:

Our hunch is that in order to succeed with SEO, you should get really good with the basics yourself before you think of outsourcing this step to a writer, freelancer, or an agency.

Internal linking has had a surprisingly positive impact on getting posts to rank faster and higher. You can also get creative and visual with internal links, here's an example of how we do it:

You can use keyword data to find ways to help your audience solve their problems.

For us, for example, we found out that with any topic revolving around "how to write X email", there is plenty of search volume for different email X email examples, samples, and templates.

This led us to create these handy samples that are a staple of our blog posts, driving plenty of additional traffic, because they help the reader:

Hi (Recipient's name),

This is an email sample we use in our blog posts. Our biggest blog post (so far) has 49 email samples!

Hope you like these at least half as much as we do.

Best, (Your name)

Be creative about it but also try to do it in a way that enhances SEO performance, like our samples and templates for example.

Website speed and ease of use are some of the key elements of SEO success. We’ve invested heavily in page speed optimization as well as user experience on our blog.

Ultimately, clicks don't mean anything and we've been intent on driving conversions since the beginning. SEO is useless if you cannot acquire users, right?

Webflow is great for the ease of designing and the ability to add custom elements like these:

Try Flowrite for free

Try Flowrite for free

"Helps if one of your founders or CEO is an amazing web developer and designer, ready to experiment with new ideas."

You can add some humor in there too. Life's too short to make SEO serious.

How could one refuse this offer? Well, try it yourself:

Another nice addition is our table of contents sidebar, which we show how to build in this blog post:

We have first-hand experience of how much one can get done by just putting their head down and doing the work. Consistency and patience are important to SEO. Our advice is that you must focus on it intensely for at least a while (maybe 6 months) to see results.

Try to hone and optimize your processes as much as you can and try to relentlessly narrow down your scope to find the few essential things that move the needle for you. Focus and ruthless prioritization will help you become more efficient in the long term, which can speed up results.

This, of course, doesn't make it any easier. One thing that does, however, is if you invest the time to find great writers. This can greatly reduce the time you spend per post (for us the difference is spending over 7h per post vs. under 2h per post) which will speed up content production and experimentation, and consequently potential results.

SEO won’t drive results immediately, and you should be transparent about it with everyone. One thing that has helped us is sharing progress with our team as well as investors.

One helpful thing we've done is mentioning SEO news, progress, and experiments (both successful and failed) in our monthly investor updates. This has led to some of our investors talking about our progress and success to other investors and portfolio companies (and sharing on socials).

Some snippets from our investor updates.‍

We firmly believe that companies/teams/people should not be afraid of doing plenty of “things that don't scale" before being able to build processes that scale. This is often the case with SEO.

Our content production processes are constantly evolving and we iterate our tools all the time. We started with a focus on creating the best content out there and we knew we could differentiate ourselves by doing all the basics better than the competition.

This meant putting more effort into keyword research (going through thousands of keywords on Semrush per post), competitor analysis, website optimization, and experimentation than everyone else.

This work has paved the way for us to create tools, templates, and processes that have allowed us to double our capacity from around 5 posts per month to over 10 per month while reducing the amount of time we spend on SEO by over 50%.

These 3 tools make the backbone of our current content marketing operations. We use Notion for almost everything, to automate all possible manual steps and save time:

This is where we keep track of our content in the pipeline. It’s the central place for all ideas, briefs in progress and writing, articles that are ready to be edited or published, and all posts that have already been published, who wrote them, what kind of brief was used, and so on.

We started out using Google Sheets but have since moved to Notion because it allows for better collaboration, removes unnecessary manual steps, is faster to use, and has better automation capabilities with Webflow (our CMS) and Make (our integrations/automation tool) for our needs.

To speed up publishing blog posts, we use a handy Make automation that checks our Notion Content dashboard every morning for new posts ready to be edited. If it finds new posts, it uploads them to Webflow and sends me a notification on Slack that it’s time to review and publish a new blog post.

Here's a simplified rundown of the steps to make the automation:

First, connect Make with Notion and create a new automation. Link your Content dashboard database with Make through “Database ID” and set filters to only look for posts ready to be published (create a Notion property such as "Status").‍

Then, you need a task that creates a new post on Webflow and pushes data from Notion properties to Webflow fields in your Blog post CMS collection. Then you can set a notification (we use Slack) so you know when to go edit and publish posts.

Finally, set a timer to check the database for new posts ready to be published, and use a frequency of your liking (I prefer once a day).

If you use WordPress as your blog, you should try Wordable and if you know of better ways to optimize our processes, let us know!

The content and structure of your briefs are heavily dependent on your company’s niche, type of product, and topic of the post itself. There are, however,some best practices and things that we’ve found effective.

There are 2 essential steps to making a content brief. How you should do them might differ, but here are the essentials of what we do:

We always target more than one keyword per post, the amount depending on the broader topic and the competition for those keywords. Our best advice is to go through a lot of keywords related to that topic and figure out a way to group them effectively.

We usually start with a list of 150-750 relevant keywords on a singular post topic and narrow it down to our subheadings by grouping each keyword with a smaller topic inside the topic.

For example, if working on a “how to ask for feedback” post, we would group all keywords containing “sample” into one group, and then again separate all different types of samples inside that group into different groups like “interview feedback sample” (and all its variations), “customer feedback email sample” (and all its variations) and so on.

At the end we have a manageable list of grouped keywords, that will be used to create the structure of the blog post, like this:

Keywords on keywords... This is manual work but tools like Google Sheets can make it easier.

Create a clear structure based on those keywords and include keywords to be used under each subheading. To make the writer’s job easier and faster, we prefer to do all the SEO-related stuff ourselves.

You can add extra information, links for inspiration, instructions, and anything else that could help the writer write better paragraphs. Make sure to ask your writers how to make their job easier and try to learn how they do research, to complement their approach with your domain expertise.

There are great resources available online to help you create better content briefs. I think, however, that the most underrated thing you can do to improve your briefs, is asking your writers for examples of good briefs they've been given before, as well as try new and different ways to make their job easier.

Our success was pioneered by Samuli (Twitter and LinkedIn), who is incredibly knowledgeable about startups and content marketing. Last summer he moved on from Flowrite to found a company, leaving a legacy of SEO performance that's still churning results.

Last but not least, a huge thank you to all the freelancer writers we’ve worked with. Especially Lawrie Jones (from the amazing 42Group), who has written over 60 blog posts with us!

If you’re interested in learning more, read about our strategy and the tactical side of things in this blog post.

Hooray, you made it to the end!

We are expanding our growth team to scale our content marketing efforts, and thus looking for amazing people who meet these 3 conditions:

Our growth team is still small, which means you have a chance to make a big impact and potentially grow into a big role. We are remote-first, mainly async, and have hired team members from all over the world (have a look at our team here), so we would love to hear from you no matter where you’re based, and no matter when or how you prefer to work :)

If you’re interested, reach out to Saku and let's have a chat: Thanks for reading this far! Salute, Saku

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